Yeah. It's quite retarded in the context as well. Bostrom's basically going on and on of how it is crunch time for the philosophy to solve eternal questions of ethics and such, and how this specific philosophy is so much more important.
Let's say someone actually solved those eternal questions.
To be specific, let's say we understood suffering. We can look at a description of a physical system, and then tell how much suffering that system is experiencing.
What does he think such answer would even look like? Picture a piece of paper, it has the answer on it, what do you think it looks like?
(Same as every other hard answer ever encountered by mankind, which wasn't bullshit: Mathematical formulas, with derivations and proofs, in all likelihood involving objects and algebras we didn't even come up with yet. Answer that is literally unthinkable today)
edit: I think it'd be fair to say that answering a difficult question before there's even a language in which an answer could be expressed is probably one of the most counter productive efforts known to mankind.
http://www.mathunion.org/general/prizes/2014
On August 13, 2014, at the opening ceremony of the [International Congress of Mathematicians](http://www.icm2014.org)) the Fields Medals, the Nevanlinna Prize and several other prizes were announced.
A full list of awardees with short citations:
Fields medals:
Artur Avila
Quanta Magazine on Artur Avila
Manjul Bhargava
Quanta Magazine on Manjul Bhargava
Martin Hairer
Quanta Magazine on Martin Hairer
Maryam Mirzakhani
Quanta Magazine on Maryam Mirzakhani
Nevalinna prize:
Subhash Khot
Quanta Magazine on Subhash Khot
Gauss Prize:
Stanley Osher
Chern Medal Award:
Phillip Griffiths
Leelavati Prize:
Adrián Paenza
In addition to that, Georgia Benkart was announced as the 2014 ICM Emmy Noether lecturer.
It might be interesting to note a curious fact about the new group of Fields medalists:
However, this unusual diversity of nationalities does not necessarily translate into a corresponding diversity of institutions, since (according to wikipedia) three out of four winners work in (or at least are affiliated with) universities that have already had awardees in the past.
Some notes on the works by Fields medalists can be found on Terence Tao's blog.
A related discussion on Hacker News.